Browsing Posts Tagged: Port Ellen

It’s cold, it’s dark, people are starting to wear winter coats, and Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible has appeared. There’s still one thing missing: the Diageo Special Releases. While Rocky got a pre-pre-launch tasting a few…

The eagerly-awaited line-up of the Diageo Special Releases 2014 has been announced. There are a total of 11 bottlings this year, including the four usual suspects (Port Ellen, Brora, Lagavulin and unpeated Caol Ila), a…

Since 2001 Diageo have announced, in October of each year, their Special Release Range. Each series of bottles is picked to highlight the best of their distilleries and are acknowledged to be landmark bottlings, representing…

After a hectic first day of this year’s TWE Whisky Show had ended with a well-behaved single pint at the egregiously smelly (but comprehensively beer-endowed) Rake Bar before an early retirement on account of toothache, I…

Recent Comments

The Paddy Centenary is spelled "whisky" like in the old days of Cork Distillers. As one company owned all the distilleries in Ireland until recently, I suppose they had a monopoly(e)y on the spelling too.Posted on: 31 March 2015

All very good points, Chris, and thanks for making them. As many want to point out, age isn’t a “guarantee of quality”, but neither is ABV, non-chill filtration, natural colour or single casking, so that’s no more an argument against leaving age off the label than it is for leaving that other information off as well. Apart from some idea of the level of industry investment in bringing a product to market, what age information provides is a frame of reference for those who have tried other whiskies of many ages and know that any of them would be very different in character at a very different age, and the industry’s desire to remove that frame of reference for its own purposes of profit making isn’t more important to consumers than their right to know what they are buying. Age doesn’t matter to a whisky’s development? Very well, show me 5 whiskies, aged 5, 15, 25, 35 and 45, which are otherwise all identical in character.
Whisky is casked, not just to store it, but to improve it and there is simply no argument to be made that age isn’t valid production information, as shown by the fact that distillation dates are still kept on every cask the industry itself produces. It’s not up to the industry to pre-empt consumers opinion on how, where or when age should be judged important by removing age information with NAS, and only where the industry itself doesn’t want to use age as a marketing point. What else don’t consumers need to know and why is the industry the arbiter of that when it’s changed its mind on the topic itself in the past so that now age is, paradoxically, BOTH important and unimportant; age was formerly considered important and now it isn’t, but ONLY where the industry doesn’t still want to discuss age with age statement to premiumize prices?Posted on: 30 March 2015